There is a continuous need for improved compositions, products, and methods that provide useful benefits to fabrics, especially clothing, such as maintaining and/or improving a good appearance, especially fabric color, especially for fabric that have been worn, through a simple and convenient application of a product.
Consumer commonly judges the desirability and wearability of a garment by many appearance criteria, such as, absence of color fading, absence of wrinkles, absence of soiling and staining, absence of damage such as pilling, and the like. It is preferable that these benefits are provided via simple and convenient consumer compositions, methods and products, to be applied in the consumer's home. These consumer compositions and products are preferably safe, and do not involve complicated and/or unsafe treatments and/or applications. Desirably they comprise treatments that are familiar to the consumers, such as spraying, soaking, adding to the wash cycle, adding to the rinse cycle, and/or adding to the drying cycle.
Many published fabric care compositions methods try to provide fabric maintenance benefits, e.g., keep fabric from, e.g., fading, wear, pilling, soiling, staining, shrinkage, and the like. However, fabric articles, such as clothing, that are worn and used will get damaged via, e.g., mechanical abrasion in use and in the laundry washing processes. The resulting worn, damaged fabric can have loosened fabric weave and pilling. Worn, damaged color fabric especially has a undersirable faded appearance. A common method that the consumer can practice to improve and/or restore the color of such worn, faded fabric is the use of fabric dyes. However, dyeing process done at home tend to result in color bleeding in the subsequent washes that can discolor other fabrics in the same wash. Furthermore, when the fabric color is not uniform, such as when the fabric has design with different colors and/or different tones of the same color, the use of fabric dyes is not desirable.
The present invention comprises methods that can be used to improve color fidelity, i.e., recover, restore, rejuvenate color of worn, damaged clothing upon a single application.
The present invention optionally can provide other fabric care benefits, such as wrinkle removal, pill prevention, anti-shrinkage, and fabric shape retention.